In early January 2005, Josh Kopelman W’93, Founder of half.com and First Round, was spending the day as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Wharton Entrepreneurship, meeting one-on-one with Penn student entrepreneurs for 30 minutes each.

There’s little debate that an MBA is a great foundation for building a business—but is it a magic bullet for budding entrepreneurs? For us, the answer was an unequivocal “yes!” While many MBA graduates go on to work in relatively narrow fields and only use a fraction of what they learned, entrepreneurs will—at some point—tap into nearly every aspect of the curriculum. In fact, taking an entrepreneurial leap is the ultimate way to put newly acquired business school skills into real-world action.